By Laurent Gayer

With an professional inhabitants coming near near fifteen million, Karachi is without doubt one of the biggest towns on the planet. it's also the main violent. because the mid-1980s, it has persevered endemic political clash and felony violence, which revolve round regulate of town and its assets (votes, land and bhatta-"protection" money). those struggles for town became ethnicized. Karachi, also known as a "Pakistan in miniature," has turn into more and more fragmented, socially in addition to territorially.

Despite this continual kingdom of city political conflict, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economic system of Pakistan. Gayer's booklet is an try to elucidate this conundrum. opposed to journalistic money owed describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there's certainly order of a sort within the city's everlasting civil conflict. faraway from being entropic, Karachi's polity is based upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic exercises that experience made violence "manageable" for its populations. even if such "ordered ailment" is achievable within the long-term is still obvious, yet for now Karachi works despite-and occasionally through-violence.

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Additional resources for Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

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These verses cannot be read in abstraction from the city’s conflictive identity politics, though. They are also consonant with a common critique among members of the Urdu-speaking middle-class towards the migrant workers who settled in Karachi after Partition, seen as insufficiently attached to the city because of their persisting bond with their villages of origin. 23 Being herself an Urdu-speaking Mohajir born and raised in Karachi, Parveen Shakir expresses in these verses a similar longing for the ‘clean’ Karachi of the early 1950s, a golden age when one could still feel at home in the city at large.

23 Being herself an Urdu-speaking Mohajir born and raised in Karachi, Parveen Shakir expresses in these verses a similar longing for the ‘clean’ Karachi of the early 1950s, a golden age when one could still feel at home in the city at large. 24 Although contradicted by historical evidence—post-Partition Karachi was certainly not the neat, peaceful and manageable city imagined by nostalgic Mohajirs—this myth has endured and was reinvigorated by the more exclusivist conceptions of home that emerged in the city in the past decades.

Although the city lost its centrality in national politics after the transfer of the capital to the Punjab in 1959, its control remained critical for political elites at the centre, if only for the city’s unrivalled contribution to the state exchequer and the national economy; 3) A modern city that expanded on the pattern of the colonial ‘dual city’, Karachi lacked an integrated planning model until the 1950s, which left the development of the poorest parts of the city to the unofficial sector.

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